Speedier broadband standards? Pai’s FCC says 25Mbps is fast enough

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing to maintain the US broadband standard at the current level of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream.

That’s the speed standard the FCC uses each year to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are “being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”

The FCC raised the standard from 4Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps in January 2015 under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler. Ajit Pai, who was then a commissioner in the FCC’s Republican minority, voted against raising the speed standard.

Congress is set to grill the FCC’s chairman… Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai should expect some tough questions at a Senate hearing last week. Last week, the agency's inspector general released a report into an incident last year in which the FCC's servers became unavailable during the comment period over Pai's repeal of the agency's net-neutrality rules. At the time of the outage, Pai and the FCC told Congress and the public that it had been caused by a cyberattack. The report found no evidence to back that assertion. In fact, investigators believed agency officials made false statements to Congress, and referred the case to federal prosecutors.…

House Democrats are demanding answers from FCC… Some of the leading Democratic members of the House of Representatives committee that oversees the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter Tuesday to Ajit Pai, the agency's chairman. In the letter, the representatives criticized Pai for falsely claiming that the FCC was the victim of a cyberattack last year. The representatives demanded to know when Pai first learned the cyberattack claim was false, and why he didn't inform them sooner about that fact. The letter follows a report from the FCC's inspector general's office last week that debunked the cyberattack allegation and comes days before Pai is due to testify…

Ajit Pai must answer for FCC’s lies to Congress… Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai listens during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC, on June 20, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg) Democratic members of Congress want to know when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai knew that the FCC's claims about being hit by a DDoS attack were false. An FCC Inspector General (IG) investigation found that the FCC lied to members of Congress multiple times in letters that answered questions about DDoS attacks that never happened. Pai's FCC claimed for more than a year that a May 2017 outage in the public comments system was…